Biometrics involves identification and verification of physical traits such as fingerprints, hand geometry, face recognition, and iris recognition, and behavioral traits such as keystroke patterns, signature, and voice recognition. Its application to the payments industry and the replacement of old-school passwords cannot be understated. With double-digit growth, biometrics is a potentially explosive sector with payments.

A new research report from Mercator Advisory Group titled Biometrics: A Market Forecast for Consumer Adoption provides predictions out to 2025 for the penetration of the U.S. market by mobile devices that implement the hardware required to support biometrics, the market availability of persistent biometrics and the percentage of the U.S. population that will utilize biometrics for authentication.

Passwords are now totally unreliable. They were vulnerable before Yahoo lost 1 billion passwords to criminals but can’t be trusted today unless additional identification methods are incorporated. Biometrics will clearly be the technology to displace passwords over time and will do so at a unexpectedly fast rate as behavioral biometrics convert the market into a software and cloud based driven solution.

The global voice recognition biometrics market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 19.36% between 2017 and 2021.

Global Voice Recognition Biometrics Market 2017-2021 by TechNavio explains voice recognition biometrics digitizes an individual's voice to match it against a stored voiceprint template. Acoustic features of an individual's voice such as pitch, cadence, and tone are compared to distinguish between individual voices.

Voice verification systems require minimal hardware installation, as most PCs already have a microphone and can authenticate individuals remotely for different transactions. Voice recognition biometrics are most likely to be deployed in telephone-based environments.

Behavioral dynamics will play an increasingly important factor in establishing trust factors for the authenticating consumers’ identity across every channel and for establishing persistent identity.

A new research report from Mercator Advisory Group titled Biometrics: A New Wrinkle Changes the Authentication Landscape is a primer on the fundamentals of biometrics for authentication of consumers’ identity. The report explains the need for multimodal biometric authentication and describes many types of biometrics available from various technology providers. The report shows how biometrics technology has shifted from a primarily hardware-based solution to a software-and cloud-based solution enabled by smartphones that have become much more secure. With voice and face recognition, and now the addition of behavioral biometrics, this shift will drive rapid new innovation and will tip the market in favor of the mobile architecture.

Increasingly smartphones are shipping with trusted execution environments that can displace traditional hardware security fobs. These new smartphones are critical to this fundamental shift in biometrics.

Criminal theft of passwords has made passwords obsolete, and so a new factor is required for authentication. Biometrics will be that new factor. It increases security and will prove more convenient for the consumer than passwords as it transitions into a persistent identity over the next 5 to 8 years.

For persistent identity, authentication no longer entails just a single challenge event such as a fingerprint scan but evolves into a passive trust value uniquely associated with an individual, as is being pursued by Google. The trust value will be constantly updated based on multiple factors including location and passive sound (voice and ambiance) as well as facial recognition and a range of behavioral inputs.

With the mobile device formulating this trust factor, it is highly likely that Apple and Google will be critical partners in consumer authentication for the majority of access control scenarios, including call centers and physical access.

This reliance on the smartphone will help establish the FIDO (the Fast Identity Online) Standard as the appropriate architectural approach for managing authentication credentials. Keeping the credentials in the handset eliminates the honeypots that attract criminals, increases consumer trust, and converts the authentication infrastructure into a shared resource that will greatly lower deployment costs currently associated with all authentication solutions.

The biometrics market in North America is expected to grow at a CAGR of 12.28% between 2016 and 2020.

The Biometrics Market in North America 2016-2020 report assembled by TechNavio explains biometrics is a technology that is useful for identifying individuals based on physical or behavioral features. It provides an additional level of security for people and important information. It involves identification and verification of physical traits such as fingerprints, hand geometry, face recognition, and iris recognition, and behavioral traits such as keystroke patterns, signature, and voice recognition.

The technology can be used for identification and authentication. The biometric system can be either an identification or a verification system. An identification system identifies an individual without their consent. These systems are more often used in surveillance applications. In a verification system, biometric traits are used to verify a person's identity.